There are lots of excellent movies in theaters right now and more on the way, so it helps to have a movie you can feel really great about missing. Take off your shoes, sit back in a cushy chair and concentrate on the fact that, at that very moment, other people are watching "Crimson Peak," and you're not. You'll feel warm all over.

As for the poor souls who can't take warning, they will suffer through a long, strangely uninteresting combination of latter-day Jane Austen and just plain disgusting. Director Guillermo del Toro has a penchant for the physically repulsive, and the effect he seems to be going for here is something like, "Ew, Guillermo, that's really gross." When we meet our heroine, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), she has a gash in her cheek and her hands and face are splashed with blood. "Ghosts are real," she announces in voiceover. A minute later, we meet our first ghost, a black skeleton in an elaborate black dress, with long, leathery tapered black fingers. She's attacking a little girl in her bed.

Ghosts continue to haunt Edith. Indeed, every time she's alone and relaxed, there's a grinding or groaning sound, and before she knows it, a red, naked thing, half covered in flesh and with big holes in its skull, is coming up through the floorboards. But here's what's funny, or unintentionally funny: No matter how many times this occurs, she never thinks to say to someone, "Hey, guess what happened to me today!" She's remarkably capable of putting these incidents out of her mind.

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"Crimson Peak" is set around the turn of the past century. Edith is an upper-class American girl, and her father (Jim Beaver) is one of the important men of the town. Father takes an instant dislike to the handsome English lord (Tom Hiddleston) courting his daughter, and he doesn't much like the lord's weird sister, Lady Lucille, played with big-eyed, unblinking intensity by Jessica Chastain.

Watching Chastain channel her inner Joan Crawford is no reason to see "Crimson Peak," but seeing a generous and abandoned actress go for broke makes the last half almost bearable.